Category Archives: Open air galleries

Time Is Gold is the name of the last production supervised by Scaner before he passed away in early September 2017. Most of his closest buddies in crews KG, DA and Four S as well as a few other friends from the Montreal graffiti scene were invited by him to contribute. The production was halfway completed at the time of Scaner’s death, so it then turned into a tribute to the writer the Montreal graff community calls their king. A candle memorial at the base of his unfinished piece was actually where his friends would congregate for a few weeks following the day Scaner passed.

The production is found on the back and side walls as well as around the playground of a private high school in central/eastern Montreal. The premises are therefore only partially accessible and should be respected.

Scaner on letters, filled by Stare and Zek, with Harry Bones on the left. From the Time Is Gold prod

The production’s main wall. Scaner did the outlines of his letters before he passed away. The fill and background of that area were completed by his brothers in KG, Stare and Zek. On the left is Scaner’s crewmate in the Four S’s, Harry Bones.

203 crew wall for the 2017 edition of Under Pressure. The 203 Invader with the munchies by Opire and the one with the giggles by Arnold and Borrris. The top letters – actually numbers – are by Naimo, the ground ones by Ekes and all the wraparound is by Lyfer and Ekes plus probably a few more 203s…

203 crew wall. The 203 Invader with the munchies is by Opire and the one with the giggles is by Arnold and Borrris. The top letters – actually numbers 203 – are by Naimo, the ground ones by Ekes and all the wraparound is by Lyfer and Ekes plus probably a few more 203s…

Monk.e, Fonki and Ankh One collaboration mural for the 2017 edition of Mural Festival

Miss Me downtown building takeover with wheatpastes for the 2017 edition of Under Pressure

Closed porn cinema covered with Miss Me wheatpastes. Pasted messages include “To be born with a woman’s body is to bear the unsolicited burden of humanity’s unresolved attitudes towards sex” and “Don’t tell me what to wear”. See below for close-up.

Miss Me wheatpaste, part of a building takeover for the 2017 edition of Under Pressure

Over the weekend of 15-16 July 2017, approximately 40 out of the best of Greater Montreal’s writers and artists were invited by Dose Culture to cover the 2 sides of a highway ramp in Longueuil with their work. The event was titled the Festival de Canes (‘Cans Festival’, a pun on Cannes Festival). Most of the space to be covered was split into sections allotted to various crews. The line-up was curated by Acek.

Over the weekend of 22-23 April 2017 the Montreal graffiti community got together to celebrate Scaner, one of this city’s best and most respected writers/artists. For the occasion, the walls of the MPC Papers building on the corner of Cabot and Gilmore in the South West (a Montreal graffiti hotspot) were completely redone by over two dozens of Montreal’s best writers and artists, plus friends of Scaner’s who traveled from as far as the USA and Barcelona for the occasion. All in all, nearly 40 new pieces were created during the weekend, they are all shown in the gallery below.

The building where the event took place has been in the past the site of graffiti gatherings such as Meeting Of Styles/Can You Rock. This is why the event was unofficially dubbed with the pun Scan You Rock and the name stuck.

The “Jailspot” is the name given by graffiti writers and urban explorers to two contiguous abandoned buildings on Henri-Bourassa at the level of the now closed Tanguay prison. These buildings were not actually part of the closed prison, they belonged to Transport Québec who once used them as hangars for heavy machinery. They appear to have been used in the recent past as offices and warehouse space. The westernmost of the two is older than the other one which seems to have been built around 2006-2007. For the following years the latter new construction was used for sporadic warehouse sales.

Business must not have been very good, the buildings were left unused as early as 2011-2012 and signs of graffiti action started appearing, first outside then inside. Within a few years the two buildings were completely taken over by explorers and writers/artists. Everything except the warehouse at the front of the easternmost building quickly deteriorated, through the combined actions of vandals and rain/snow through broken doors and windows as well as collapsed roofs. The two buildings were finally gradually demolished over the spring and summer of 2016 to make space for the construction of controversial residential/commercial towers.

If you have any additional information about this spot, feel free to write in and contribute to this article.

The gallery below is divided by rooms and other areas where artists left their mark. The names of the rooms are not official ones, I just came up with them for comprehensive purposes. A plan of the spot can be seen below, at the top of the gallery.

Rouks (woman and bird), Lapin (headdress) and Sirvis (top). If you look closely, you’ll see that the feathers on the woman’s headdress are actually graffiti letters by Speak (top feather), Capes (middle feather), Eskae One (bottom feather).

The Transco will probably be remembered as one of the greatest graffiti galleries in Montreal because of the size as well as the quality of the collection that was created within its walls. Never before had our city seen so many pieces of quality graffiti in one place. The collection of works which came to life inside the Transco was impressive in size because of the sheer dimensions of this warehouse complex (40 000 square meters), but also in quality because the building was demolished before lack of available free walls forced writers to go over each other’s works, and before the arrival of too many writers of lesser talent.

This huge warehouse, taking up most of the block within the streets St-Laurent, Chabanel, Esplanade and Louvain in today’s fashion district, started off as a military complex. It was built in 1943 by the Canadian Defense and was originally used for parachute packing for the army. After the war ended it served as an administrative office of military equipment. In the 1950s it was sold to private interests. Before its doors closed at the very beginning of 2013 it had served for a number of years as a distribution centre for the Transco Plastic Industries Inc. For over two years following its closing, the complex seems to have been visited only by urbex photographers and by an ex-employee who would squat there on and off. Around the end of May 2015 the RCD crew discovered the place with its huge rooms and thousands of square meters of virgin walls. For a few weeks they were the only ones in there, until some point into July when the SIK crew arrived. They first made it onto the roofs where they left a bit of art, then soon enough found a way in.

Because the site was easily accessible and many entryways into the buildings had been created, the gallery developed very quickly and most of the collection was created from August to November 2015. An impressive number of Montreal as well as visiting writers checked the place out at least once during that period. The place has even been used for fashion photography or for the filming of music videos. At the end of November 2015 the owners had a fence put up around the complex. That, with the arrival of winter, brought activity to a near-standstill. But the existence of a few secret entryways and the mellowness of the 2015-2016 winter have made it possible for the more dedicated writers to keep on creating there and for graffiti fans such as myself to keep on documenting the evolution of the Transco’s impressive collection.

In February 2016 teams arrived on the premises to prepare the buildings for demolition. They started by emptying the place of anything that may have still been useful and removed the asbestos inside its walls. Demolition started in the middle of March and at the end of July nothing was left of Montreal’s greatest graffiti gallery but a few piles of debris waiting to be cleared out.

My image gallery for the Transco features over 400 photos, mainly burners with a selection of throws and tags, plus a few general shots of some of the rooms. Because of its size, I had to split it up into 4 sections:

If you want to see some of the rooms in 360° as if you were there, or if you are equipped for Virtual Reality, you are welcome to Take A Tour. If you are interested in great photos of the place after it was closed but before the arrival of graffiti, check out Urbex Playground.